The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500(Historical Urban Studies) (Hardcover)

by Jill Steward (Editor), Alex Cowan (Editor)

Synopsis

How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.

Contents:

Stench in sixteenth-century Venice

Jo Wheeler

'Not carrying out the vile and mechanical arts': touch as a measure of distinction in early modern Venice

Alexander Cowan

Speaking and listening in early modern London

Laura Wright

Engineering vision in early modern Paris

Ulf Strohmayer

Touching London: contact, sensibility and the city

Ava Arndt

Sewers and sensibilities: the bourgois faecal experience in the nineteenth-century city

David Inglis

'We demand good and healthy beer': the nutritional and social significance of beer for the lower classes in mid-nineteenth-century Munich

Kim Carpenter

Boulevard culture and advertising as spectacle in nineteenth-century Paris

Hazel Hahn

A taste of Vienna: food as a signifier of urban modernity in Vienna, 1890 - 1930